Buildings always fascinated me. I was lucky in that Schenectady’s school district had a technical program that exposed me to mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, drafting and such. I liked design, and I liked the science of putting buildings together. When I first got out of college, I worked for a structural steel fabricator in Schenectady and the construction bug bit, but I still wanted to design. For the next eight years, I worked for two different architectural firms locally, and helped design a couple of buildings. But always in the back of my head, construction was where I wanted to be.

What does it mean to be working at the Capitol as opposed to any other building?

There’s only 50 of this building type in the country, so to be part of its legacy is an honor. And that’s something that I remind everybody that I work with. To be working at the Capitol with everything else going on, we really have to step up our game. In some ways we’re in a fishbowl; everybody’s watching. We can’t afford anything to happen, there are just too many repercussions. Plus, the building materials we get to work with — we’re so spoiled! I talk to colleagues of mine and friends from college: They don’t get to work with the type of things that we’re doing, dealing with monolithic pieces of stone, terra cotta — they’re dealing in concrete block and drywall and such. We get to plaster.